When to call the soldiers home

Why it is in America’s own interest to let the Iraqis have their way

BARACK OBAMA and John McCain have spent much of the past year quarrelling about when and how the United States should leave Iraq, hoping to sway the minds of millions of American voters. What is sometimes overlooked in this quarrel is that Iraq has rather an important vote too.

The Bush administration and the Iraqi government have been having a tetchy negotiation in recent months about how long, and under what terms, American forces will be allowed to stay after their United Nations' mandate expires at the end of December. Since Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, knows he needs the help of American forces a good while longer, and the Americans know that he knows, the likelihood is that the two sides will come to an agreement. But the talks have gone on longer than expected, so a breakdown is not impossible. That could have very bad consequences.

The gap is not huge. The latest leaked draft would “aspire” to have American troops leaving Iraq by the end of 2011. That is later than Mr Obama's preferred date (May 2010) and probably earlier than Mr McCain's (unspecified), but the date itself is not as big an issue as it seems. Both candidates have left themselves room for manoeuvre, and Mr Maliki probably wants flexibility too, in case he still needs American firepower three years hence to suppress insurgents or defend his borders.

The trouble is that Mr Maliki is not Saddam Hussein. For all the things America has got wrong in Iraq, the government in Baghdad is not the dictatorship or the theocracy that critics once saw as the only possible outcomes of this bungled war. Instead, Iraq is beginning to resemble a democracy, albeit a fragile and imperfect one. Mr Maliki, running a small party in an unruly coalition, has both provincial and parliamentary elections ahead. So whatever his private views, he needs to take account of the impatience of Iraqis to see the back of the occupiers. He also needs to be seen to drive a hard bargain.

A time to play the long game

And America's interest, strange as it sounds, is to let him do just that. Having booted out the previous regime, the American army is apt to feel it can do what it likes in Iraq, especially when it comes to the conduct and deployment of its own troops. No longer. If it is to secure its long-term relationship with Iraq, the superpower had better adjust fast to the idea that Iraq is once again a sovereign country, one that has a powerful sense of wounded pride and some prickly sensibilities.

By some accounts, the Americans have already conceded a lot. They are reported, for example, to have promised that military operations in Iraq will be more closely co-ordinated with the Iraqi government, that American troops will leave the streets, and, perhaps, that soldiers who commit crimes while not in their bases or on operations could be subject to Iraqi law. Some of these undertakings stick in the craw of an army with an understandable instinct for control freakery. The last is especially tricky, given Iraq's dysfunctional justice system. But they are a small price to pay to secure the gains for which American soldiers in Iraq have paid with so much blood.

And that is what's at stake. Look ahead: within a few years, most of the troops will be out and America will depend on soft power to compete with Iran for the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Pro-Iranian parties in Iraq already portray the troop talks as a bid to turn Iraq into an American vassal. Mr Maliki must find the courage to explain in public why this is not so. But by doing more to help him, perhaps by supporting that “aspiration” for 2011 a bit more enthusiastically, America's departing president could leave the next one a far better chance of keeping Iraq on America's side in the years to come.